The experience of listening to music consists of two seemingly incompatible challenges. If you watch a film without trying to retain the image of the past, that is to say, what happened so far in the plot all the while focusing on taking in what's happening right now in some sort of dreamlike stupor, it could be argued you're missing out, you're being lazy, you are in one way or another engaging with this artform wrong. Let us not dwell on the exceptions to this logic and observe the general rule, for now.
Similarly with reading a book. How often have your eyes glazed over as you read a sentence and you've realized you have lost focus and you have to go back and re-read the whole page to pick up the track. So to say, there is some sort of track, you are on the scent towards some ultimate revelation, such is the power of prose. Even a poem can bewilder the mind in such ways that it sends one back, back, back again, start from the beginning, hold in your heart this immensity.
Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress
The Human Dress, is forged Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.
Music is the one art form (aside from perhaps more abstract types of video art, which also usually most often employ the guiles of music) that welcomes your letting go of the past, asks you to forget everything about just a moment ago and carry on with the ever-unfolding present. I suggest that it also goes further than that: by form and function (the richness of this ongoing ever-present moment) it actually resists your nostalgia for the past. There is simply no time for it, and if a record makes you yearn for the song before as the current song sucks then it cannot be said to be a complete offering, can it? The most beautiful music wants to enthrall you with such an impossible promise: oh, you liked that? Well get ready for this. And soon after, all this will be developed further into that. Truly in music does the soul feel drunk with the whole of possibility. The drunk mind often returns in circles, in little spirals, projecting a weightless vector filled with sanguine humour, a morning of regret and then...
The dialectic completes itself in time. If a song, or album, or movement is truly beautiful we do not listen to it only once. The experience on the whole delivers us in a state beyond nostalgia, it makes one feel the deepest sense of melancholia instead. Oh, how I long to listen to this song again and again not because this gave way into that but because the experience on the whole was blissful. It lifted up the chains of time from my soul, the excitement was so complete, it was as if nothing bad had ever happened for a short spell.
When we listen to a song - or an album, or a symphony - again and again no matter how much the jubilance of the ever-present moment resists our plotting, we do chart, if not a course, a place. A geography. We create a map. In our 'anticipation of perception' we are longing and looking forward to beautiful musical events experienced before, and in our retraced present we are connecting our herewithin with what will come again. Music makes us long for a future on repeat. Music has very little to do with the past. Dionysus, drunk with wine and ready to fuck, as he has done a thousand nights before is longing for this experience that will inexorably lead to that one, he's not thinking of the experience of yesterday. What is the broader story that coheres as we levitate upwards from this orgy of lust in particular to hold in our eye this entire city?
No other artform is so 'repeatable' as an experience. Not prose, not poetry, not even painting (its closest relative in the realm of longing). Only music is engaging our ever-present now with a future we anticipate in full knowledge of its goodness and of its potential for perpetual revelation. Our past is just the totality of life spent seeking.
A deep love of music, not just of listening to songs but somehow charting their potential spaces through a deeper connection, through a ritual of repetition, through this annihilation of the past is a high sign of innocence, that something in the heart is intact no matter how they cut at you. The monad is love.
Finding oneself listening less and less attentively, not for signs of the past but for how this moment connects to future moments, moments well forecasted but never fully and completely described (as the potential of the future is limitless) is a sign that cynicism now rests at the throne of want. A heart made of clay, hollow to the touch, reverberation empty.
Take out an album, do nothing, truly do nothing but listen to it, read the lyrics, memorize the moments that are to come, touch the future potential. No spotify, no cat videos, no other distraction to your excitement for this present moment reaching to the beauty of the next. Well forecasted, you know the movement of the seasons in this realm, even though you can never predict what new will be stirred in the subconscious by the inchoate and dreamlike motions of the clouds.
Showing posts with label thank god for the music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thank god for the music. Show all posts
Monday, February 24, 2025
Saturday, April 21, 2018
Xerxes - Myth and Poetry
My love,
It has been years since we've last corresponded.
I still see you in my dreams.
The first dream was of a spectral, pale vision of your former self. Three months ago. You moved closer to me in the darkness and I felt the cold aura of a white ghost. You told me 'perhaps I have died'.
I awoke screaming, in the middle of the night. My room, a room I had taken great pains to sanctify and protect from the reach of sinister forces, it now felt empty of air, my walls freezing to the touch. Evil was in my room, I could feel it. The promise of your death had robbed me of my vitality and precious wisdom. I lay shivering in my bed like a child, lost to the world and lost to your light.
I pulled out every cantrip and minor miracle I had learned in my 33 years, I prayed to the Goddess and chanted evocations, I called to Athena to destroy your enemies, I prodded the eldest serpent in the bottom of your ocean fault to shift, to move, to disperse these aspersions of your sanctity. You are the Goddess. You are the priestess. Can the priestess die?
I triangulated the source of my numerous infections, in this weak moment startlingly clear to me and their bodies towered over me in my small London room, suffocating me with their mad cry of nihil. If you are dead then so am I. Perhaps I have never existed.
A bad moon, an ugly moon I thought I would never again have to think of again towered in the sky. It's been a hundred years, it's been a thousand years, my love. The mistress made her perennial demand: holocaust. I can not shoulder this burden as I once thought I could and this is why I first reached out to you, after this first dream, for answers or even just a word.
I wrote to you with a plea of re-connection and a secret desire of re-cognition. If I have spoken ill of you, I apologize. If I evangelized your death, I apologize a thousand times. If I made love to a corpse of a memory while I pretended to simply dissect it, for this hypocrisy and hubris I will apologize forever. Forever.
Please believe me.
Months later, you came to me in a second dream.
Your presence was foretold and I didn't believe it. The priestess will arrive, you just have to be patient, I was told by other wandering shadows. I knew the place and I knew the time and still I didn't believe. I am so sorry, I feel so small. A small thing that nonetheless, exists. You have your mercy.
A small thing looks up to you and at once, now, sees you, as you did come. Your eyes were silver with prescience, your face, a face I hadn't been able to re-collect for 7 years was more beautiful than my heart can bear and... I was ashamed.
I looked aside, like a bumbling teenager, I had no words, I pretended to be one of the other wandering shadows, to bask indirectly in your light like a tired serpent on a stone. I was nothing in that moment, but it only lasted a lifetime. My ossified corpse still remembered training, and wisdom and truth: truth is always liquid, liquid re-sanguinated this corpse. I simply couldn't stand still, I had to turn to you, again, my love. This training you imparted, and this wisdom I conquered in this and other lives.
I turned my head, again, to you, all my little courage to look into the wound.
You ran to me and embraced me.
You kissed me on my lips.
You whispered to me two things:
"I am alive, you big dummy" and then,
"Hold me tighter".
I am so sorry. I repent for everything. My love for you is eternal, and so you will never die. Your myth is mine, and so, my poetry is yours. I know you don't belong to me, anymore, if you ever did. I know that every living being feels the same love for you that I do. I know the Creator of this world, even he in his madness and cruelty, he writes his poetry to you. God's own erotic poetry, it is everywhere around me. We all bend our knee to you with gratitude and longing. The dreams that we dreamed of, awake, alone and silent in the dark.
I woke up from this second dream to my little, warm room in London, with renewed, crystal remembrance of what love is and what obligation is. My freedom is found in your servitude. I turned on a computer and checked an e-mail account and you had written back to me. I was a fool but I am a fool no longer.
Xerxes were a 90's progressive metal band. They put out two records and disappeared. They sound like nobody else and near-nobody cares about them now or even remembers them. Nobody? NOBODY?
Archives have weight and all that, I have been crushed under the weight of my own archive - we've been over this. But poetry is not an archive, it is an act of love. Poetry on the page is weightless, it is levitating, it is like the butterflies that flutter in the hollow inside of a human body, as it is probed by the silver string of pathos.
This is the solution to our particular conundrum. The name of the blog solves itself. I'm not afraid to write to you about an old Swiss band that means this much to me.
Xerxes have a little bit of Watchtower in them, a little bit of Psychotic Waltz, perhaps, yada yada yada. They don't have a domineering vocalist and that's probably why they vanished into obscurity, or perhaps people confused their innocence for lightness. Heavy metal has to be heavy, right? Regardless of whatever lack it was that damned Xerxes into obscurity, what they do have is heart and a message and absolutely no fucking distance between them. Can you say the same for your creative pursuits, dear reader? Have you dissolved all the distance between the bleeding stone inside you, from which flow a thousand secret streams of romance, and the bullshit that comes out of your mouth? I didn't think so.
It's alright, hey, neither have I! But Xerxes achieved this, and so they must never be forgotten. Let me help you help me help Xerxes never be forgotten, not through an addendum to a self-important archive, but through poetry and myth.
Let's do this in this way. Chances are you haven't heard this shit before, so here you go, the internet provides, or at least NOW it does, not 20 years ago when self-important little metalheads had to write to Hellion mailorder to get cds and vinyl in the mail and then carry big boxes home as if they were treasures the extracted from a horde of a dragon - aren't all these old-metalhead nostalgic ballads disgusting? This is a better world. Just click on a youtube link to listen to the first of the two offerings by Xerxes:
Read while you listen, then perhaps listen without reading, you know what to do. I trust you, regardless of your first impressions with this music, to never forget Xerxes.
Here's why many people do not even recognize this as metal music, though it definitely is, and instead call it prog-rock of some sort. There's not even a little bit of what Xerxes do (especially in their debut that you're listening to now) that is not borne out of a pure desire to capture and portray beauty. There's no evil and no violence to these songs, there's only absolute, otherworldly, ethereal motion and playful, expressionist movement. It's hard to listen to 'Beyond Your Imagination' and not imagine a wandering through field and forest of pastoral, resonant calm. There's stories to these songs, fairy-tales, moral paradigms, but it is the setting that is the star of the show.
Where is any other metal music that proudly exclaims to be beyond usual imaginations of metal boundaries and themes? Where is any other metal music not trapped within a suffocating box of its own nihilist masculinity? Where is any other metal music that transports the mind in an a-temporal realm of pure wanting?
It's impossible to feel nostalgia of a tangible, bygone moment in one's life, when listening to Xerxes. The point of this music, the pure quintessential distillation of it is that it evokes a desire to return to a fantastic place that we've never visited, but yet exists.
This is the poetry I want to write about Xerxes, this is my obligation to you, this is the thing that has changed in the long trek through this subcultural examination and all my scattered musings lead to it, in-advertently, in-exorably: that place exists. It exists Beyond Our Imagination as we stand now, but it exists and our imagination can lead us there, if we try. It is a disservice to our love and our freedom-in-servitude to be the solipsist, the rationalist, the relativist and chalk up this feeling that you feel as you listen to Xerxes, perhaps for the first time (oh, how I envy you, how I love you for it) to an invocation of a nostalgia of a place that doesn't exist and then return to a reality that does exist. If you have gone Beyond Your (once capped) Imagination, why would you choose to forget where you went and return to a basest stricture?
Our lives are not floating in a meaningless void, we are anchored by a commonality of hope and desire. I know your hopes and desires, you know mine. You always knew. Xerxes provide a sketch, to the best of their ability, with disarming earnestness, of that place we all know but because of life being so hard, we often choose to forget. A levitating castle in the sky, a forest in the mists, a river that runs down the mountain, through the fields and up the same mountain, again. Eternal. Contemplate eternity!
In the heart of this realm is the same old stone, we all know it, its bleeding horror and thousand inspirations. They are not all beautifull, but they're real, as real as your dumb computer screen shooting electrons in your eyeballs.
As such, in that place, this real place, we will never die.
The music of Xerxes is filled with playful twists and turns, democratically partitioned between two guitar players and a host of keyboard orchestrations that have symphonic ambitions. The historical lineage of NWOBHM to techno-thrash riffery to proto-progressive to the realized conclusion of metal-band-as-orchestra can be traced by those with a kink for metal history. We've talked about this stuff before, right? You know all of this. You can understand Xerxes just fine.
And you can be kind to a vocalist of limited means and big ambitions. Did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to listen to actual orchestras, conducted by actual geniuses, so far away from you they might as well be alien beings visiting this world? Or did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to hear what simple people like you and I, of limited means and talent, can do when they devote their soul to this big ambition of describing in poetry and song, That Place?
Good answer.
The first album by Xerxes ends in this declaration, in all its English-as-a-Second-Language-Heavy-Metal-as-the-First beauty:
"All you poets of this world, you have been honored by the Grace.
Writing in the manner you wish, gliding out of this Earthly realm.
Raise your voice again and again. They should announce us as messengers.
Catch the world of phantasm and bring it over here, with which we want to align.
Our desire is to defeat the bluntness, to save the highest aim.
We do not want to comply any longer with this interminable, senseless game.
Raise your voices again and again and create new poems, fairy-tales and songs.
All you poets of this world."
It's okay to cry.
The first album did nothing, it made no splash, nobody bought it or listened to it besides a few prog metal nerds, and here we are. But it's fair to understand why Xerxes themselves might have been wounded that their pure-heart offering did not receive an enthusiastic welcome by the '90s metal scene.
What would you do, friend? You would disband, of course. Or you'd start playing Pantera power groove with keyboard solos on top like Dream Theater. You'd have become bitter and cynical. You'd have chased musical competencies that are recognized by the wider professional world. Whatever.
What did Xerxes do? They self-funded and self-released an even better, more ambitious, more multifaceted, more carefully constructed, more beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful offering to the same feeling, That Same Place, they didn't give up and they didn't believe your lies that you didn't recognize what they're singing about. They looked at you straight in the eyes, from the darkness their obscurity had damned them to, and they smiled kindly.
And perhaps a bit wickedly, as their second offering is darker.
After crossing the threshold with "Beyond Your Imagination", Xerxes were wounded in the battle with infamy, and they emerge on "Falling Leaves" (consider the autumnal theme) as warrior-poets, not just bards. This record is devoutly metal, the minstrel folk of the debut has been minimized. Here the melancholy of a bygone reality reigns paramount. This is the dark middle chapter of a trilogy that wasn't to be and it's a tragedy that it wasn't, as far as I'm concerned. There's no red "split up" in metal-archives that saddens me as much as the one in Xerxes's entry. It's sad because it was we that were pushing Xerxes into the darkness.
"Wait! Wait. I have so much more to tell you." calls the warrior poet in the cerulean mists.
I stress this, friend. Where Xerxes are taking us is a reality. Not fantasy. Reality. The Place is real and you must also do your best to eradicate your distance. We've talked about what tools to use and we've talked about what art is on this blog for a long time. Help me help you help Xerxes. Don't be a jerk.
The twists and turns of the material are no longer playful and innocent. They are dramatic in full consideration, and the sharpness of the violence of nihility rears its head, as it is to be battled. The devil must visit all of us in the desert.
"Nowhere in this world
I can find a refuge
Silent and dark is my love
Doesn't make any sense
Or is it too late?"
But Xerxes will remind you of the terror as they reminded you of the hope of sentience. The blood flows from the stone in the heart of the kingdom. Pretend you don't understand, pretend until you drown in your own cynical abjection and wordly rationality. Pretend that you can make it through this life without love and freedom. Xerxes will have none of it, they cannot bear to tell a lie.
Xerxes will never tell you any lies.
Fall under their spell and never forget them. This is art borne from kindness and its minor cruelties are because kindness has to be a cruelty sometimes, if it is to spark remembrance. They did this for the betterment of all humanity. They made zero money for it, they have no peer accolades to show for it. A hundred people across the globe listened and loved them and remembered. I am one of them. It was by chance but it wasn't an accident.
Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing for you if you loved and remembered them too?
If you found them naive on their debut that naivete is of the Fool on the start of his Tarot journey. Xerxes reflected on this, and "Falling Leaves" finds the Hanged Man in mid-stride, levitating, upside-down. He will take on all colours if he is to reach The World. All the hyperbolic death-obsessed death and black metal that you use as a poison salve for a misunderstood wound, Xerxes are aware, awake and in full knowledge that the wound is beautiful and they will guide you through it, for 37 minutes, once 37 minutes, twice, to lead to, well... you know where.
Pay attention to the track "Sam Hain". In whispers and premonitions it is the key. The debut failed (insofar that a masterpiece can be called a failure) because it did not acknowledge their own shadow, perhaps. All of the beautiful heritage of Fates Warning, Watchtower, Psychotic Waltz, all of the technology this strange of music developed in its multifaceted ambitions, it is all employed for a singular concern here: Meet your Shadow Self. Step right through your Shadow Form. Come out the other side. You are reminded of something right now, and your memory does not steer you wrong. Many people have tried to tell you the same thing in different ways. They weren't lying. Xerxes will tell you no lies.
Sam Hain in the middle has no lyrics. It has instrumental force that goes through a lot of contrasting motion. Keep your focus. You can use your mind to see the images. Step through the shadow. Nobody said it would be easy. In the middle you may feel that the World seems to be dead. That all color sadly dissipates. That for all your faith, you are left in the night sea, drifting.
But in the distance you will see a bridge,
floating
It has been years since we've last corresponded.
I still see you in my dreams.
The first dream was of a spectral, pale vision of your former self. Three months ago. You moved closer to me in the darkness and I felt the cold aura of a white ghost. You told me 'perhaps I have died'.
I awoke screaming, in the middle of the night. My room, a room I had taken great pains to sanctify and protect from the reach of sinister forces, it now felt empty of air, my walls freezing to the touch. Evil was in my room, I could feel it. The promise of your death had robbed me of my vitality and precious wisdom. I lay shivering in my bed like a child, lost to the world and lost to your light.
I pulled out every cantrip and minor miracle I had learned in my 33 years, I prayed to the Goddess and chanted evocations, I called to Athena to destroy your enemies, I prodded the eldest serpent in the bottom of your ocean fault to shift, to move, to disperse these aspersions of your sanctity. You are the Goddess. You are the priestess. Can the priestess die?
I triangulated the source of my numerous infections, in this weak moment startlingly clear to me and their bodies towered over me in my small London room, suffocating me with their mad cry of nihil. If you are dead then so am I. Perhaps I have never existed.
A bad moon, an ugly moon I thought I would never again have to think of again towered in the sky. It's been a hundred years, it's been a thousand years, my love. The mistress made her perennial demand: holocaust. I can not shoulder this burden as I once thought I could and this is why I first reached out to you, after this first dream, for answers or even just a word.
I wrote to you with a plea of re-connection and a secret desire of re-cognition. If I have spoken ill of you, I apologize. If I evangelized your death, I apologize a thousand times. If I made love to a corpse of a memory while I pretended to simply dissect it, for this hypocrisy and hubris I will apologize forever. Forever.
Please believe me.
Months later, you came to me in a second dream.
Your presence was foretold and I didn't believe it. The priestess will arrive, you just have to be patient, I was told by other wandering shadows. I knew the place and I knew the time and still I didn't believe. I am so sorry, I feel so small. A small thing that nonetheless, exists. You have your mercy.
A small thing looks up to you and at once, now, sees you, as you did come. Your eyes were silver with prescience, your face, a face I hadn't been able to re-collect for 7 years was more beautiful than my heart can bear and... I was ashamed.
I looked aside, like a bumbling teenager, I had no words, I pretended to be one of the other wandering shadows, to bask indirectly in your light like a tired serpent on a stone. I was nothing in that moment, but it only lasted a lifetime. My ossified corpse still remembered training, and wisdom and truth: truth is always liquid, liquid re-sanguinated this corpse. I simply couldn't stand still, I had to turn to you, again, my love. This training you imparted, and this wisdom I conquered in this and other lives.
I turned my head, again, to you, all my little courage to look into the wound.
You ran to me and embraced me.
You kissed me on my lips.
You whispered to me two things:
"I am alive, you big dummy" and then,
"Hold me tighter".
I am so sorry. I repent for everything. My love for you is eternal, and so you will never die. Your myth is mine, and so, my poetry is yours. I know you don't belong to me, anymore, if you ever did. I know that every living being feels the same love for you that I do. I know the Creator of this world, even he in his madness and cruelty, he writes his poetry to you. God's own erotic poetry, it is everywhere around me. We all bend our knee to you with gratitude and longing. The dreams that we dreamed of, awake, alone and silent in the dark.
I woke up from this second dream to my little, warm room in London, with renewed, crystal remembrance of what love is and what obligation is. My freedom is found in your servitude. I turned on a computer and checked an e-mail account and you had written back to me. I was a fool but I am a fool no longer.
Xerxes were a 90's progressive metal band. They put out two records and disappeared. They sound like nobody else and near-nobody cares about them now or even remembers them. Nobody? NOBODY?
Archives have weight and all that, I have been crushed under the weight of my own archive - we've been over this. But poetry is not an archive, it is an act of love. Poetry on the page is weightless, it is levitating, it is like the butterflies that flutter in the hollow inside of a human body, as it is probed by the silver string of pathos.
This is the solution to our particular conundrum. The name of the blog solves itself. I'm not afraid to write to you about an old Swiss band that means this much to me.
Xerxes have a little bit of Watchtower in them, a little bit of Psychotic Waltz, perhaps, yada yada yada. They don't have a domineering vocalist and that's probably why they vanished into obscurity, or perhaps people confused their innocence for lightness. Heavy metal has to be heavy, right? Regardless of whatever lack it was that damned Xerxes into obscurity, what they do have is heart and a message and absolutely no fucking distance between them. Can you say the same for your creative pursuits, dear reader? Have you dissolved all the distance between the bleeding stone inside you, from which flow a thousand secret streams of romance, and the bullshit that comes out of your mouth? I didn't think so.
It's alright, hey, neither have I! But Xerxes achieved this, and so they must never be forgotten. Let me help you help me help Xerxes never be forgotten, not through an addendum to a self-important archive, but through poetry and myth.
Let's do this in this way. Chances are you haven't heard this shit before, so here you go, the internet provides, or at least NOW it does, not 20 years ago when self-important little metalheads had to write to Hellion mailorder to get cds and vinyl in the mail and then carry big boxes home as if they were treasures the extracted from a horde of a dragon - aren't all these old-metalhead nostalgic ballads disgusting? This is a better world. Just click on a youtube link to listen to the first of the two offerings by Xerxes:
Read while you listen, then perhaps listen without reading, you know what to do. I trust you, regardless of your first impressions with this music, to never forget Xerxes.
Here's why many people do not even recognize this as metal music, though it definitely is, and instead call it prog-rock of some sort. There's not even a little bit of what Xerxes do (especially in their debut that you're listening to now) that is not borne out of a pure desire to capture and portray beauty. There's no evil and no violence to these songs, there's only absolute, otherworldly, ethereal motion and playful, expressionist movement. It's hard to listen to 'Beyond Your Imagination' and not imagine a wandering through field and forest of pastoral, resonant calm. There's stories to these songs, fairy-tales, moral paradigms, but it is the setting that is the star of the show.
Where is any other metal music that proudly exclaims to be beyond usual imaginations of metal boundaries and themes? Where is any other metal music not trapped within a suffocating box of its own nihilist masculinity? Where is any other metal music that transports the mind in an a-temporal realm of pure wanting?
It's impossible to feel nostalgia of a tangible, bygone moment in one's life, when listening to Xerxes. The point of this music, the pure quintessential distillation of it is that it evokes a desire to return to a fantastic place that we've never visited, but yet exists.
This is the poetry I want to write about Xerxes, this is my obligation to you, this is the thing that has changed in the long trek through this subcultural examination and all my scattered musings lead to it, in-advertently, in-exorably: that place exists. It exists Beyond Our Imagination as we stand now, but it exists and our imagination can lead us there, if we try. It is a disservice to our love and our freedom-in-servitude to be the solipsist, the rationalist, the relativist and chalk up this feeling that you feel as you listen to Xerxes, perhaps for the first time (oh, how I envy you, how I love you for it) to an invocation of a nostalgia of a place that doesn't exist and then return to a reality that does exist. If you have gone Beyond Your (once capped) Imagination, why would you choose to forget where you went and return to a basest stricture?
Our lives are not floating in a meaningless void, we are anchored by a commonality of hope and desire. I know your hopes and desires, you know mine. You always knew. Xerxes provide a sketch, to the best of their ability, with disarming earnestness, of that place we all know but because of life being so hard, we often choose to forget. A levitating castle in the sky, a forest in the mists, a river that runs down the mountain, through the fields and up the same mountain, again. Eternal. Contemplate eternity!
In the heart of this realm is the same old stone, we all know it, its bleeding horror and thousand inspirations. They are not all beautifull, but they're real, as real as your dumb computer screen shooting electrons in your eyeballs.
As such, in that place, this real place, we will never die.
The music of Xerxes is filled with playful twists and turns, democratically partitioned between two guitar players and a host of keyboard orchestrations that have symphonic ambitions. The historical lineage of NWOBHM to techno-thrash riffery to proto-progressive to the realized conclusion of metal-band-as-orchestra can be traced by those with a kink for metal history. We've talked about this stuff before, right? You know all of this. You can understand Xerxes just fine.
And you can be kind to a vocalist of limited means and big ambitions. Did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to listen to actual orchestras, conducted by actual geniuses, so far away from you they might as well be alien beings visiting this world? Or did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to hear what simple people like you and I, of limited means and talent, can do when they devote their soul to this big ambition of describing in poetry and song, That Place?
Good answer.
The first album by Xerxes ends in this declaration, in all its English-as-a-Second-Language-Heavy-Metal-as-the-First beauty:
"All you poets of this world, you have been honored by the Grace.
Writing in the manner you wish, gliding out of this Earthly realm.
Raise your voice again and again. They should announce us as messengers.
Catch the world of phantasm and bring it over here, with which we want to align.
Our desire is to defeat the bluntness, to save the highest aim.
We do not want to comply any longer with this interminable, senseless game.
Raise your voices again and again and create new poems, fairy-tales and songs.
All you poets of this world."
It's okay to cry.
The first album did nothing, it made no splash, nobody bought it or listened to it besides a few prog metal nerds, and here we are. But it's fair to understand why Xerxes themselves might have been wounded that their pure-heart offering did not receive an enthusiastic welcome by the '90s metal scene.
What would you do, friend? You would disband, of course. Or you'd start playing Pantera power groove with keyboard solos on top like Dream Theater. You'd have become bitter and cynical. You'd have chased musical competencies that are recognized by the wider professional world. Whatever.
What did Xerxes do? They self-funded and self-released an even better, more ambitious, more multifaceted, more carefully constructed, more beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful offering to the same feeling, That Same Place, they didn't give up and they didn't believe your lies that you didn't recognize what they're singing about. They looked at you straight in the eyes, from the darkness their obscurity had damned them to, and they smiled kindly.
And perhaps a bit wickedly, as their second offering is darker.
After crossing the threshold with "Beyond Your Imagination", Xerxes were wounded in the battle with infamy, and they emerge on "Falling Leaves" (consider the autumnal theme) as warrior-poets, not just bards. This record is devoutly metal, the minstrel folk of the debut has been minimized. Here the melancholy of a bygone reality reigns paramount. This is the dark middle chapter of a trilogy that wasn't to be and it's a tragedy that it wasn't, as far as I'm concerned. There's no red "split up" in metal-archives that saddens me as much as the one in Xerxes's entry. It's sad because it was we that were pushing Xerxes into the darkness.
"Wait! Wait. I have so much more to tell you." calls the warrior poet in the cerulean mists.
I stress this, friend. Where Xerxes are taking us is a reality. Not fantasy. Reality. The Place is real and you must also do your best to eradicate your distance. We've talked about what tools to use and we've talked about what art is on this blog for a long time. Help me help you help Xerxes. Don't be a jerk.
The twists and turns of the material are no longer playful and innocent. They are dramatic in full consideration, and the sharpness of the violence of nihility rears its head, as it is to be battled. The devil must visit all of us in the desert.
"Nowhere in this world
I can find a refuge
Silent and dark is my love
Doesn't make any sense
Or is it too late?"
But Xerxes will remind you of the terror as they reminded you of the hope of sentience. The blood flows from the stone in the heart of the kingdom. Pretend you don't understand, pretend until you drown in your own cynical abjection and wordly rationality. Pretend that you can make it through this life without love and freedom. Xerxes will have none of it, they cannot bear to tell a lie.
Xerxes will never tell you any lies.
Fall under their spell and never forget them. This is art borne from kindness and its minor cruelties are because kindness has to be a cruelty sometimes, if it is to spark remembrance. They did this for the betterment of all humanity. They made zero money for it, they have no peer accolades to show for it. A hundred people across the globe listened and loved them and remembered. I am one of them. It was by chance but it wasn't an accident.
Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing for you if you loved and remembered them too?
If you found them naive on their debut that naivete is of the Fool on the start of his Tarot journey. Xerxes reflected on this, and "Falling Leaves" finds the Hanged Man in mid-stride, levitating, upside-down. He will take on all colours if he is to reach The World. All the hyperbolic death-obsessed death and black metal that you use as a poison salve for a misunderstood wound, Xerxes are aware, awake and in full knowledge that the wound is beautiful and they will guide you through it, for 37 minutes, once 37 minutes, twice, to lead to, well... you know where.
Pay attention to the track "Sam Hain". In whispers and premonitions it is the key. The debut failed (insofar that a masterpiece can be called a failure) because it did not acknowledge their own shadow, perhaps. All of the beautiful heritage of Fates Warning, Watchtower, Psychotic Waltz, all of the technology this strange of music developed in its multifaceted ambitions, it is all employed for a singular concern here: Meet your Shadow Self. Step right through your Shadow Form. Come out the other side. You are reminded of something right now, and your memory does not steer you wrong. Many people have tried to tell you the same thing in different ways. They weren't lying. Xerxes will tell you no lies.
Sam Hain in the middle has no lyrics. It has instrumental force that goes through a lot of contrasting motion. Keep your focus. You can use your mind to see the images. Step through the shadow. Nobody said it would be easy. In the middle you may feel that the World seems to be dead. That all color sadly dissipates. That for all your faith, you are left in the night sea, drifting.
But in the distance you will see a bridge,
floating
Friday, November 17, 2017
I'm not done yet.
In the couple of years that I've left our Poetry to lie languid and dormant I've put my efforts not in the business of telling but in the business of doing. My very own heavy metal band, of which I never speak on this blog and also kind of inwardly-narcissistically very seldom speak of in general put out a debut album after a long period of gestation. Long as in 15 years long.
You can find your way to that record if you really want to, it doesn't matter to me, or to be frank it only matters to me if you really want to. I have become no less cruel or arrogant with the passage of time (I am now 33, Jesus Christ did his best work at 33) and most importantly I've only become more and more tired.
I was tired of this project when I stopped it 2 years ago and it wasn't just because I had said what I thought I needed to say (such a thing is inconclusive after all - did I need to say anything at all to begin with? And if so, how do I know the need is done?) . It was - as I think I explained in some post or another - the gravity of this artificial Archive that I had built about the history and meaning of heavy metal that was weighing on me. Not because it is false, I am very proud of my false archive, to be sure. We are here right now, communicating again because I googled something I thought Castaneda had said and Unholy used as a lyric, but it turns out if you google it you come here. I completed my own circle, and so Old Helm read some of what Young Helm had to say and the Helms agreed and it was good. Jesus probably reads the bible in heaven some times too and he's like "... I'm pretty cool".
I think an archive has no erotic weight to it unless it is false in that particular, subtle, personal way that any such existentialist history project has to be. I am not a real historian, I am, you should recognize this as well, not a real anything, honestly. And that's not just an ok state of affairs, it is, as I said, a passionate, erotic state of being, for arrogance and ignorance to be such fuel to build an awkward, lopsided edifice, a glorification of something or another, such as the Poetry of Subculture, right?
I wasn't tired because this archive is false, too personal, finished or unnecessary. I was tired because this thing has weight. You write it and then you have to live with it. Even when I forgot what I had written, I still lived with it because I agreed with it. It became a subconscious truth. That's how magic works, and this is a ritual if nothing else. Who knew that writing about heavy metal would be heavy, huh? You, you in particular, dear reader, you could have warned me but I wouldn't have listened. For the sorcerer exhaustion is ecstasy. Google it.
I think it's time to talk about heavy metal again, friends. The world has taken an ugly turn in the in-between time and although I try with my own music to bring a subtler kind of light to this darkness, we will need all our tools and all our dirty tricks to turn the tide, this time. My dirty tricks are bad epistemology, bad history, half-spoken truths and a smile in the darkness. A surreptitious heaven will answer our call. Tell your friends.
Once a reader of some repute, a musician himself of some capability and renown, told me in e-mail correspondence on subject of my older, more private music that I should give up: he thought my music amateurish and my guitar playing a joke and he insisted that I should stick to writing about metal instead of making metal because that's what, he thought, I was good at.
The funny thing is that I never thought of myself as much of a writer, I am wrestling with every fucking sentence in a second language and it's not necessarily fun, but it might be necessary anyway. So, amateurish guitar playing and music, and amateurish writing. I'll use all my tools and dirty tricks, friends. I'll convince you of something you already always suspected.
Why? Because of the neo-nazis, to be honest.
In the interim of our silence here we have had a right-wing turn of global discourse. We have Trump in power and his alt-right internet meme magicians cackling like the toads they are. Internet heavy metal culture played a special role in this turn of events, one I didn't in all my quasi-wisdom predict. It seems an opposing and older Archive of What Heavy Metal Is, that of anus.com, as designed by Spinoza Ray Prozak at the dawn of the internet has won the day: though what's left of that site now, under different name and management, is in complete decline, the actual ideological framework of heavy metal as proposed and reiterated by a million anus drones over the last two decades have left their mark and they propagated through the broader 'internet culture' as designed by 4chan and other such 'edgy' subcultures online: heavy metal has been almost totally usurped by 'alt-right' third-way apolitaeic neo-nazis, occult fascists and other Julius Evola spawn. Especially the field of black metal (and a lot of the more dark and cavernous death metal) is well beyond the realm of 'sketchy'. New memes abound to describe this new historical circumstance, for example "It's only a sunwheel". This meme describes the diversionary tactics of our new breed of heavy metal fascists, whom when confronted with, uh, that there's swastikas or black suns or SS runes on their record covers, they reply with how no no you've got it all wrong, these ancient symbols pre-date the Third Reich and are used in a more esoteric and traditional way.
We don't hate other cultures. We just love Europa and want to see it return to its prior glory.
Somehow.
This isn't a new narrative, but it has had a new function in the current political climate. Where once the political climate in the metal subculture was such that these clowns were powerless and easy to ignore (as unwise as that was) now, where all of the western world is bent on a rightwards trajectory, every single idiot with a palingenetic ultra-nationalist agenda is actually helping along a very tangible 'fascist creep' with these Third-Way diversionary tactics. So, when near-fascists are in power we have to re-examine our own burden in our own subculture. We should do this now, before fascists-fascists are in power.
Fascists infiltrated black metal and heavy metal at large over a long period of time, right under our noses and we are ill-equipped to spot them, exclude them from our subculture and mend the damage they have done because we're still thinking in 1999 terms, where Capitalism 'won' and history 'was finished' and grand narratives 'were dead' and it was just a consumerist paradise for atomized people going on with their atomized lives. Heavy metal has always been a conservative cultural force, and people fall for 'it's only a sunwheel!' every day. Even people that don't fall for it and can spot the dark humour of such memetic propagation find it hard to divorce themselves from the problematic elements of our subculture, because the problematic has overtaken the non-problematic. Anywhere you turn and go 'I like THIS band in particular, they seem nice!' it will turn out later that they're neo-nazis, or nationalists, or their best mates are neo-nazis, or they've worked with a neo-nazi label or they're just simpler and they just hate the gays or whatnot. It's a disaster, and 'the other side' as it where is politically not equipped to make its voice heard. Because metalheads are either -consciously or unconsciously - on the right or apolitical. And this has to change, because in this political climate, being apolitical is being on the right.
So, at the face of this new Trump reality that emboldens cretins worldwide to be more vocal with their hatred, we have to fight back in any way possible. Does this mean that Poetry of Subculture will now be the equivalent of Who Makes The Nazis but not for neo-folk, industrial and post-punk but for Heavy Metal? As much as I wish I had the mental fortitude to attempt that, sadly not, but perhaps that void will be filled by other nodes on the internet soon. I'm not enough of a historian, not enough of a Marxist and probably not enough of a human to tackle something like that on my own.
No, we will fight back against the forces of darkness by strengthening our own Archive, our own lopsided edifice to something or another. That's all I can do and I'll do it pretty much the same way I started. I'll talk about the records, I'll talk about the historical circumstances that brought us here, I'll talk about pathos, eternal beauty and the will of the gods (that has great, great power) and I will listen to you. So, make yourselves heard.
In this way we will imagine a different use for heavy metal than that of a foil for nationalistic identity politics at best and outright propaganda for Evolean fascism at worst. Because heavy metal is Chaos, like mother Tiamat writhing in the bottom of the deepest ocean fault. But Chaos is not evil. It can be - and has been - used for evil, but Chaos is just Chaos, it means anything and everything. Even idiots, even amateur, tired musicians with no achievements to recommend them can touch that chaos core, and they can be mutated into some imaginary shape or another.
Of all the shapes we can imagine, we can do better than the shape of a racist, homophobic neo-nazi. Not only can we, but we must.
For all these words, you know what's up and you know what we're going to do. We're going to listen to the muuuusic, think about for a long time and then write some words about it. That's what humans do, they use culture to understand themselves. And we must understand what Heavy Metal has done to us. Let's strike the black old stone a second time with childlike hope and irreverent intent: let the blood of romance flow from the stone, forever.
You can find your way to that record if you really want to, it doesn't matter to me, or to be frank it only matters to me if you really want to. I have become no less cruel or arrogant with the passage of time (I am now 33, Jesus Christ did his best work at 33) and most importantly I've only become more and more tired.
I was tired of this project when I stopped it 2 years ago and it wasn't just because I had said what I thought I needed to say (such a thing is inconclusive after all - did I need to say anything at all to begin with? And if so, how do I know the need is done?) . It was - as I think I explained in some post or another - the gravity of this artificial Archive that I had built about the history and meaning of heavy metal that was weighing on me. Not because it is false, I am very proud of my false archive, to be sure. We are here right now, communicating again because I googled something I thought Castaneda had said and Unholy used as a lyric, but it turns out if you google it you come here. I completed my own circle, and so Old Helm read some of what Young Helm had to say and the Helms agreed and it was good. Jesus probably reads the bible in heaven some times too and he's like "... I'm pretty cool".
I think an archive has no erotic weight to it unless it is false in that particular, subtle, personal way that any such existentialist history project has to be. I am not a real historian, I am, you should recognize this as well, not a real anything, honestly. And that's not just an ok state of affairs, it is, as I said, a passionate, erotic state of being, for arrogance and ignorance to be such fuel to build an awkward, lopsided edifice, a glorification of something or another, such as the Poetry of Subculture, right?
I wasn't tired because this archive is false, too personal, finished or unnecessary. I was tired because this thing has weight. You write it and then you have to live with it. Even when I forgot what I had written, I still lived with it because I agreed with it. It became a subconscious truth. That's how magic works, and this is a ritual if nothing else. Who knew that writing about heavy metal would be heavy, huh? You, you in particular, dear reader, you could have warned me but I wouldn't have listened. For the sorcerer exhaustion is ecstasy. Google it.
I think it's time to talk about heavy metal again, friends. The world has taken an ugly turn in the in-between time and although I try with my own music to bring a subtler kind of light to this darkness, we will need all our tools and all our dirty tricks to turn the tide, this time. My dirty tricks are bad epistemology, bad history, half-spoken truths and a smile in the darkness. A surreptitious heaven will answer our call. Tell your friends.
Once a reader of some repute, a musician himself of some capability and renown, told me in e-mail correspondence on subject of my older, more private music that I should give up: he thought my music amateurish and my guitar playing a joke and he insisted that I should stick to writing about metal instead of making metal because that's what, he thought, I was good at.
The funny thing is that I never thought of myself as much of a writer, I am wrestling with every fucking sentence in a second language and it's not necessarily fun, but it might be necessary anyway. So, amateurish guitar playing and music, and amateurish writing. I'll use all my tools and dirty tricks, friends. I'll convince you of something you already always suspected.
Why? Because of the neo-nazis, to be honest.
In the interim of our silence here we have had a right-wing turn of global discourse. We have Trump in power and his alt-right internet meme magicians cackling like the toads they are. Internet heavy metal culture played a special role in this turn of events, one I didn't in all my quasi-wisdom predict. It seems an opposing and older Archive of What Heavy Metal Is, that of anus.com, as designed by Spinoza Ray Prozak at the dawn of the internet has won the day: though what's left of that site now, under different name and management, is in complete decline, the actual ideological framework of heavy metal as proposed and reiterated by a million anus drones over the last two decades have left their mark and they propagated through the broader 'internet culture' as designed by 4chan and other such 'edgy' subcultures online: heavy metal has been almost totally usurped by 'alt-right' third-way apolitaeic neo-nazis, occult fascists and other Julius Evola spawn. Especially the field of black metal (and a lot of the more dark and cavernous death metal) is well beyond the realm of 'sketchy'. New memes abound to describe this new historical circumstance, for example "It's only a sunwheel". This meme describes the diversionary tactics of our new breed of heavy metal fascists, whom when confronted with, uh, that there's swastikas or black suns or SS runes on their record covers, they reply with how no no you've got it all wrong, these ancient symbols pre-date the Third Reich and are used in a more esoteric and traditional way.
We don't hate other cultures. We just love Europa and want to see it return to its prior glory.
Somehow.
This isn't a new narrative, but it has had a new function in the current political climate. Where once the political climate in the metal subculture was such that these clowns were powerless and easy to ignore (as unwise as that was) now, where all of the western world is bent on a rightwards trajectory, every single idiot with a palingenetic ultra-nationalist agenda is actually helping along a very tangible 'fascist creep' with these Third-Way diversionary tactics. So, when near-fascists are in power we have to re-examine our own burden in our own subculture. We should do this now, before fascists-fascists are in power.
Fascists infiltrated black metal and heavy metal at large over a long period of time, right under our noses and we are ill-equipped to spot them, exclude them from our subculture and mend the damage they have done because we're still thinking in 1999 terms, where Capitalism 'won' and history 'was finished' and grand narratives 'were dead' and it was just a consumerist paradise for atomized people going on with their atomized lives. Heavy metal has always been a conservative cultural force, and people fall for 'it's only a sunwheel!' every day. Even people that don't fall for it and can spot the dark humour of such memetic propagation find it hard to divorce themselves from the problematic elements of our subculture, because the problematic has overtaken the non-problematic. Anywhere you turn and go 'I like THIS band in particular, they seem nice!' it will turn out later that they're neo-nazis, or nationalists, or their best mates are neo-nazis, or they've worked with a neo-nazi label or they're just simpler and they just hate the gays or whatnot. It's a disaster, and 'the other side' as it where is politically not equipped to make its voice heard. Because metalheads are either -consciously or unconsciously - on the right or apolitical. And this has to change, because in this political climate, being apolitical is being on the right.
So, at the face of this new Trump reality that emboldens cretins worldwide to be more vocal with their hatred, we have to fight back in any way possible. Does this mean that Poetry of Subculture will now be the equivalent of Who Makes The Nazis but not for neo-folk, industrial and post-punk but for Heavy Metal? As much as I wish I had the mental fortitude to attempt that, sadly not, but perhaps that void will be filled by other nodes on the internet soon. I'm not enough of a historian, not enough of a Marxist and probably not enough of a human to tackle something like that on my own.
No, we will fight back against the forces of darkness by strengthening our own Archive, our own lopsided edifice to something or another. That's all I can do and I'll do it pretty much the same way I started. I'll talk about the records, I'll talk about the historical circumstances that brought us here, I'll talk about pathos, eternal beauty and the will of the gods (that has great, great power) and I will listen to you. So, make yourselves heard.
In this way we will imagine a different use for heavy metal than that of a foil for nationalistic identity politics at best and outright propaganda for Evolean fascism at worst. Because heavy metal is Chaos, like mother Tiamat writhing in the bottom of the deepest ocean fault. But Chaos is not evil. It can be - and has been - used for evil, but Chaos is just Chaos, it means anything and everything. Even idiots, even amateur, tired musicians with no achievements to recommend them can touch that chaos core, and they can be mutated into some imaginary shape or another.
Of all the shapes we can imagine, we can do better than the shape of a racist, homophobic neo-nazi. Not only can we, but we must.
For all these words, you know what's up and you know what we're going to do. We're going to listen to the muuuusic, think about for a long time and then write some words about it. That's what humans do, they use culture to understand themselves. And we must understand what Heavy Metal has done to us. Let's strike the black old stone a second time with childlike hope and irreverent intent: let the blood of romance flow from the stone, forever.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Walls of Jericho pt.1 - The Cover
For those not about to scroll, I present to you again:
One
of the stupidest Heavy Metal covers that I've ever seen. Really. But
it'd take me a long while to understand why it's stupid. It's worth
mentioning that I never thought this cover was cool, not even as a 12
year old. It looked too weird and plastic to be scary. The giant
destroying the wall looked to me as if he were wearing a mask, that
this wasn't his real face. Why else would he have human hands?
I'm an artist now, I certainly wasn't at twelve, but there's things even a twelve year old sees from an aesthetic standpoint. They just take them at face value instead of criticizing them. It's supposed to look weird. For example, the broken parts of the bulwark that are flying about look like they're made from tinfoil or something. There's just too much highlight and liquidity to the forms, now I realize. I do like (and I liked as a child as well) the bits of storytelling to this cover. There's footsteps in the sand leading up to the scene, so this giant has traveled an epic journey to come smash these walls. And I do think the person flying off at top is kinetically well-done, I do believe he's screaming for his life wondering why his God wouldn't help him. Wait.
So... yes. As I understand it, this cover, along with the name of the record are a reference (and an intro to “Ride the Sky”) to the biblical tale of the Israelites marching, their trumpets bringing down the walls and all that. I had no knowledge of this story when I got this record, and for some years after, actually. I read the Bible mostly for polemic reasons as a very angry fifteen year old or so. That aspect of this cover, now known to me, only serves to make this cover look even more silly. Helloween are telling us that this monster (which even at twelve I realized from my brother's Iron Maiden covers was an Eddie rip-off) is an agent of God of some sort? Well that's... nice. 12 year old Helm had no idea what white metal was at that point and just how many power metal bands (especially from the U.S). had a crypto-biblical message in their lyrics. Were Helloween a Christian band? Not very much, at this point. They would turn to even more positive Christian-lite apologetic sloganeering with age, and especially with their drastic lineup shifts. The jump from this, their debut to their 'Keeper of the Seven Keys' follow-up is very dramatic, though. This record's got a lot of bite to it, even the cover is violent, at least.
Other things my 12 year old self noted and I still find funny about this cover: the muppetface spearman running towards us in the bottom right corner. The one chance for the cover artist to inject some human pathos into the situation and it turns out they can't draw faces to save their life. This must have been even worse in the original LP size. The way the artist gave up drawing proper masonry on the far wall, instead sticking to the Chris Achilleo patented solution of 'stick a sporadic brick texture in there and they'll buy it'. Less bad but still kind of funny is the airbrush sunset in the horizon. This technique, now very out of fashion is therefore very obviously dated. Some people have a soft spot of airbrushed Heavy Metal covers. I don't enjoy the muddy result even when I do enjoy the naive motifs.
Other things I liked and continue to like about this cover: There's a real sense of impact to the wall punch, I'll give the artist that. Good parallel action with closer people shocked at the event and further people running for cover. I guess that spear that the main defender is holding up against the monster is very sharply rendered and sticks out even at the tiny CD cover resolution, which is... good? The logo is ace. I love prespective logos and even from early on when I toyed with starting a band, a top priority was to draw its logo-to-be in various prespectives. Prespective rocks! More a problem with the logo is that the symmetry is off. The pumpkin is not in direct middle. And it's maddening because 'Hell' and 'Ween' are the same number of letters. The artist just had to make the two L's take a bit more space each and it'd been... well, something a twelve year old would have dissected less endlessly.
I'm an artist now, I certainly wasn't at twelve, but there's things even a twelve year old sees from an aesthetic standpoint. They just take them at face value instead of criticizing them. It's supposed to look weird. For example, the broken parts of the bulwark that are flying about look like they're made from tinfoil or something. There's just too much highlight and liquidity to the forms, now I realize. I do like (and I liked as a child as well) the bits of storytelling to this cover. There's footsteps in the sand leading up to the scene, so this giant has traveled an epic journey to come smash these walls. And I do think the person flying off at top is kinetically well-done, I do believe he's screaming for his life wondering why his God wouldn't help him. Wait.
So... yes. As I understand it, this cover, along with the name of the record are a reference (and an intro to “Ride the Sky”) to the biblical tale of the Israelites marching, their trumpets bringing down the walls and all that. I had no knowledge of this story when I got this record, and for some years after, actually. I read the Bible mostly for polemic reasons as a very angry fifteen year old or so. That aspect of this cover, now known to me, only serves to make this cover look even more silly. Helloween are telling us that this monster (which even at twelve I realized from my brother's Iron Maiden covers was an Eddie rip-off) is an agent of God of some sort? Well that's... nice. 12 year old Helm had no idea what white metal was at that point and just how many power metal bands (especially from the U.S). had a crypto-biblical message in their lyrics. Were Helloween a Christian band? Not very much, at this point. They would turn to even more positive Christian-lite apologetic sloganeering with age, and especially with their drastic lineup shifts. The jump from this, their debut to their 'Keeper of the Seven Keys' follow-up is very dramatic, though. This record's got a lot of bite to it, even the cover is violent, at least.
Other things my 12 year old self noted and I still find funny about this cover: the muppetface spearman running towards us in the bottom right corner. The one chance for the cover artist to inject some human pathos into the situation and it turns out they can't draw faces to save their life. This must have been even worse in the original LP size. The way the artist gave up drawing proper masonry on the far wall, instead sticking to the Chris Achilleo patented solution of 'stick a sporadic brick texture in there and they'll buy it'. Less bad but still kind of funny is the airbrush sunset in the horizon. This technique, now very out of fashion is therefore very obviously dated. Some people have a soft spot of airbrushed Heavy Metal covers. I don't enjoy the muddy result even when I do enjoy the naive motifs.
Other things I liked and continue to like about this cover: There's a real sense of impact to the wall punch, I'll give the artist that. Good parallel action with closer people shocked at the event and further people running for cover. I guess that spear that the main defender is holding up against the monster is very sharply rendered and sticks out even at the tiny CD cover resolution, which is... good? The logo is ace. I love prespective logos and even from early on when I toyed with starting a band, a top priority was to draw its logo-to-be in various prespectives. Prespective rocks! More a problem with the logo is that the symmetry is off. The pumpkin is not in direct middle. And it's maddening because 'Hell' and 'Ween' are the same number of letters. The artist just had to make the two L's take a bit more space each and it'd been... well, something a twelve year old would have dissected less endlessly.
As
a Greek I wasn't very aware of what Halloween was, so the pumpkin
head in the logo (and other iconography by this band) was more a
Helloween thing than a Halloween thing, if you get my meaning. That
goes double for the - awful - pun in the name. It's like Halloween
you say but it's hellish? It's like, for real, man? Terrible idea for
a name, I'm sure the band, later in their success, agrees. I had no
idea at twelve it was even a pun. Look, I get that Heavy Metal names
have to be inversions. Iron Maiden. Black Sabbath. Judas Priest. I
get it. But putting the Hell in Halloween is just kind of stupid and
obvious. It's saved for me because Helloween the band are infinitely
more important than Halloween the dressing-up american holiday ever
came to be. To carry this point further, "Walls of Jericho"
is far more important to me than the Walls of Jericho themselves are.
In a more depressing note, that monster on the cover is probably more
important to me than his daddy, Eddie is.
As to those strange words on the cover. What is a Mini-LP? I sure like how it's Extra-long playing though! I have this one CD to listen to for a year, good that's there's a lot of sounds on it! I didn't even know that this CD includes the 'Helloween E.P', however. And the cover doesn't mention it either. When I redownloaded a better sounding rip of this than I had made on WMA on my very first personal computer, I was shocked to find that the record starts with "Walls of Jericho", not "Starlight" as I had been used to for a decade and a half. For me that just isn't right, so we're going to talk about the Helloween E.P. both as a part and at odds with the rest of this material, starting with the next post.
Does anybody really need 71:30 of Helloween all in one go? There's record label pressure for you. It would plague Helloween and Gamma Ray for a long time, Noise wanting them to make their next 70 minute opus. As a child I would never put on a record and listen to just half of it, so this was an endeavor to sit through. I still don't like to turn songs off, but I have grown a lot more lenient with skipping tracks altogether. That's a practice that dates as far back as my infatuation with this record because let's face it... there's a couple of bad tracks on here. But we'll get to them.
Things I realized about this cover later in life are obvious, I guess. Heavy Metal covers like to have monsters and violence on them, so Helloween half-heartedly followed suit. The monster is an aforementioned Eddie rip-off, because all Heavy Metal bands owe it to their fans to have a mascot to make merchandise of. Little did young Helloween know that their real mascot potential was in silly pumpkin-head comedic caricatures and not in Eddie-son here. Kai Hansen would keep this monster when he would leave Helloween to go start Gamma Ray, for good or worse. I also learned that '80s cover artists like to airbrush and they especially like to do highlights with white airbrush, which looks awful and unnatural. In the same vein I also learned that most of these covers must have been done in a real hurry and without much reference. The latter perhaps is a good thing to make this art individual-looking, the former never is for any art, ever.
Edda and Uwe Karczewski are credited in the booklet for this creation. The idea for the cover goes to guitarist M. Weikath. We are all much obliged.
As to those strange words on the cover. What is a Mini-LP? I sure like how it's Extra-long playing though! I have this one CD to listen to for a year, good that's there's a lot of sounds on it! I didn't even know that this CD includes the 'Helloween E.P', however. And the cover doesn't mention it either. When I redownloaded a better sounding rip of this than I had made on WMA on my very first personal computer, I was shocked to find that the record starts with "Walls of Jericho", not "Starlight" as I had been used to for a decade and a half. For me that just isn't right, so we're going to talk about the Helloween E.P. both as a part and at odds with the rest of this material, starting with the next post.
Does anybody really need 71:30 of Helloween all in one go? There's record label pressure for you. It would plague Helloween and Gamma Ray for a long time, Noise wanting them to make their next 70 minute opus. As a child I would never put on a record and listen to just half of it, so this was an endeavor to sit through. I still don't like to turn songs off, but I have grown a lot more lenient with skipping tracks altogether. That's a practice that dates as far back as my infatuation with this record because let's face it... there's a couple of bad tracks on here. But we'll get to them.
Things I realized about this cover later in life are obvious, I guess. Heavy Metal covers like to have monsters and violence on them, so Helloween half-heartedly followed suit. The monster is an aforementioned Eddie rip-off, because all Heavy Metal bands owe it to their fans to have a mascot to make merchandise of. Little did young Helloween know that their real mascot potential was in silly pumpkin-head comedic caricatures and not in Eddie-son here. Kai Hansen would keep this monster when he would leave Helloween to go start Gamma Ray, for good or worse. I also learned that '80s cover artists like to airbrush and they especially like to do highlights with white airbrush, which looks awful and unnatural. In the same vein I also learned that most of these covers must have been done in a real hurry and without much reference. The latter perhaps is a good thing to make this art individual-looking, the former never is for any art, ever.
Edda and Uwe Karczewski are credited in the booklet for this creation. The idea for the cover goes to guitarist M. Weikath. We are all much obliged.
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